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TCOPY(1) FreeBSD General Commands Manual TCOPY(1)
NAMEtcopy -- copy and/or verify mag tapes
SYNOPSIStcopy [-cvx] [-smaxblk] [src [dest]]
DESCRIPTION
The tcopy utility is designed to copy magnetic tapes. The only assump-
tion made about the tape layout is that there are two sequential EOF
marks at the end. By default, the tcopy utility will print information
about the sizes of records and files found on the /dev/sa0 tape, or on
the tape specified by the src argument. If a destination tape is also
specified by the dest argument, a copy of the source tape will be made.
The blocking on the destination tape will be identical to that used on
the source tape. Copying a tape will yield the same program output as if
just printing the sizes.
The following options are available:
-c Copy src to dest and then verify that the two tapes are iden-
tical.
-smaxblk Specify a maximum block size, maxblk.
-v Given the two tapes src and dest, verify that they are identi-
cal.
-x Output all informational messages to the standard error
instead of the standard output. This option is useful when
dest is given as /dev/stdout.
SEE ALSOmt(1), mtio(4)HISTORY
The tcopy command appeared in 4.3BSD.
BUGS
Writing an image of a tape to a file does not preserve much more than the
raw data. Block size(s) and tape EOF marks are lost which would other-
wise be preserved in a tape-to-tape copy.
End of data (EOD) is determined by two sequential EOF marks with no data
between them. There used to be old systems which typically wrote three
EOF's between tape files. The tcopy utility will erroneously stop copy-
ing early in this case.
When using the copy/verify option -c, tcopy does not rewind the tapes
prior to start. A rewind is performed after writing, prior to the veri-
fication stage. If one does not start at the beginning-of-tape (BOT)
then the comparison may not be of the intended data.
FreeBSD Ports 11.2 December 20, 2006 FreeBSD Ports 11.2